"Rayleigh!"
"Ardi." He walked into the square without slowing, and the roots dragged toward the motion with a sound like teeth on a plate.
The petals turned to face him, and the voice hitched and slid into a young man's.
"—sir, I think I'm lost, could you come here a moment, just here—"
Behind him a rookie made a broken noise and took half a step.
Ardi's arm shot back across his chest without her head so much as turning.
"Eyes down, Toll! Watch the roots, not the voice. Whatever's talking, there's no one left in there to answer it." She'd shrunk her world to the shield in front of her and the wall of it beside her, and she was holding both.
He'd talked at this girl for the better part of a year about how her sword thought, how her enemies thought, and some of it had stuck after all.
"How long?" he asked, stopping ten paces from the thing.
"Since he dropped at his stall, maybe six minutes." Her knuckles stood white around Nejibana's grip, the tremor she kept out of her voice loose in her hands instead.
"He went missing four days back. He came home, Rayleigh. Walked in yesterday, ate dinner, opened his stall this morning like nothing happened, and then he — then that." Her jaw worked. "It said my name. A minute ago it said my name in his voice. How does it know my name?"
"Somebody said it near a wall it was listening through." He looked at what was left of the fishmonger, the apron and the single boot and the roots threaded through the place a heart used to be, feeding the empty shell so it could keep broadcasting.
When she asked the next question he didn't dress it up, because she'd hear the lie, and because she deserved better than one.
"Can you save him?"
"No."
Her throat moved.
She looked at the ruined man a second longer, then nodded once, and it cost her something to give that nod, and she paid it without a word.
"Then don't let it keep him," she said, low, meant for him and no one else. "He was somebody's neighbor. Don't let it walk him around after."
Whatever settled in Rayleigh's chest then had nothing gentle in it.
Not mercy!
The thing she'd asked him for, underneath the words.
'Fast. Clean. Gone before it can make him into another mouth.'
He could manage that.
A viola grown through Daedalus wiring moved with a purpose no honest monster had, so before anything else he took the purpose off the board.
He raised two fingers, and didn't bother with the chant, because for something this small the chant would have been an insult to them both.
"Bakudō #61: Rikujōkōrō!"
Six thin bars of yellow light snapped into place around the flower's core and slammed shut, pinning the whole obscene structure where it stood.
The roots hauled at the far cobbles, trying to drag the mass sideways out of the light the way they must have dragged it out of tighter spots before.
They got nowhere.
The rods weren't cobbles, and he wasn't a frightened Level 2 in a dark tunnel.
'There. Now you can't lunge at the children. Let's have a look at you.'
He drew Ruri'iro Kujaku, and the square took a small breath.
"Bloom in a frenzy, Ruri'iro Kujaku!"
The blade came apart into lapis light and the light became vine, and the vine poured into the pinned flower like ivy with a whole season crammed into one second, reaching and threading and sinking into the roots.
Where it touched, it drank.
The borrowed not-life came up the vines and into him, sour and thin and deeply wrong, and it told him everything he'd been afraid of.
There was no soul in the thing.
There had been one, four days ago, and something had scooped it out and left the socket wired to a length of cord, a rhythm, and a hunger that was not the flower's own.
"Rayleigh—" Ardi had Nejibana leveled, water already climbing the trident's tines. "It's pulling toward the line again!"
"It can't reach them. But go ahead and remind it."
"With pleasure!" She drove the butt of the trident down and called it out clean and bright, like she still half-believed she was in one of her hero stories.
"Rankle the Seas and the Skies, Nejibana!"
A low wall of water climbed between the flower and the shields. The roots recoiled from it, and behind the rush her men steadied and the fake voice went muffled and small.
'Water. It doesn't like open water any more than the tunnel did.'
He'd seen enough.
Rayleigh let the vines fall slack, because every second he drew this out was a second the fishmonger's own voice might surface in that hollow, and he'd promised a girl it wouldn't.
His right hand found the newest weight at his hip.
'Fine. Let's find out if you're as much trouble as you look.'
"Awaken, Benihime."
The blade came out red. Not painted, not lit from within.
Red the way the inside of a body is red, and the low hum he'd never fully trusted climbed into a note that set the flower's petals rigid and every hair on the cordon on end.
Benihime didn't drink and it didn't bind.
It held one opinion about a problem, and the opinion was a single crimson line drawn through the world at the height of his shoulder.
"Nake, Benihime!"
The crescent of red light left the edge and crossed the square ahead of the sound of its own name.
It went through the roots where they clustered thickest, through the base of the bloom, through the whole wired architecture of the thing in one clean stroke, and it did not cut the flower so much as cut the decision holding it together.
The viola came apart into wet dark petals already rotting before they touched the ground. The roots died in the stone all at once. The socket where a man's soul had been simply went out.
The voice stopped in the middle of a word.
An apron, a single boot, and a drift of ash the wind had already begun taking were all that remained of whoever had sold fish on Benen Street.
Silence dropped over the plaza like a sheet let go. Even the gulls had shut their beaks.
Rayleigh flicked Benihime once out of habit, though it never carried blood to flick, and slid it home.
The red hum sank back to a mutter that sounded, distinctly, like it had found the whole business beneath its dignity and had only obliged because he'd asked nicely.
Ardi let her water fall.
It came down in a hiss and ran away down the gutters, and she stood in the middle of it breathing hard, trident still up, staring at the little grey pile where a person had been standing.
"...We didn't even get his name," she said.
The fury had drained out of her, and what it left behind was quieter and heavier and suited her worse.
"Ganesha keeps stall registries. You'll have it by tonight." He crossed to the ash and crouched.
There among it, where the roots had bunched thickest, something gleamed that wasn't ash: a short length of black-red cord, the same wet color as the flower, coiled neat and whole in the wreckage of everything it had grown through.
The twin of the one they'd pulled off the girl beneath the canal.
It was tapping.
Slow and deliberate. Three beats, then a pause. Three beats, then a pause.
He knew that rhythm from Karz's testimony and from the sealed sample that had fallen quiet on his desk sometime after midnight, and it meant the thing wasn't sending a message so much as knocking on a door.
Except this time the door had been a man in a market, and the whole city had just been demoted to a wall for the thing underneath it to rap its knuckles against.
Ardi crouched beside him, close enough that her shoulder nearly came against his.
The earlier fear had scrubbed off her, and her jaw was set now in a way that made her look older than the girl who'd flinched at the voice.
"It's checking if anyone's home," she said.
She wasn't asking.
She'd worked it out already, and faster than he'd have said aloud, since telling her would only go to her head.
"Yeah."
"So do we answer it?"
Rayleigh reached out with two fingers and pressed the cord flat against the stone until the rhythm died under his hand, and very far below the plaza he felt something take note, cold and certain, that its knock had met no answer.
"We answer." He stood, five sheaths riding heavy and crooked on his back, and this time the weight of them didn't feel absurd at all.
"Just not by knocking back politely."